


Our antebellum innocence

by Skoll



Category: The Avengers (2012)
Genre: Age Regression/De-Aging, FrostIron - Freeform, Loki Feels, Loki Redemption, M/M, Memory Loss, Redemption, Though to be clear no Frostiron happens while Loki is still a kid, Tony Stark Has A Heart, Tony being surprisingly not terrible with children
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-07-08
Updated: 2013-07-08
Packaged: 2017-12-18 03:59:37
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,504
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/875372
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Skoll/pseuds/Skoll
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When something goes awry in the middle of battle and leaves Loki deaged, stranded on Earth, and without any memories of his adult life, Tony's pretty much expecting it to lead to mayhem, chaos, and destruction, the same way most things that happen around Loki do.  </p><p>The last thing he expects is to actually like the kid. </p><p>(Or: Loki at eleven is precocious and still a bit of an asshole, Tony tries to distract him with science, and somewhere along the way the two of them realize they have more in common than either was expecting.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Our antebellum innocence

**Author's Note:**

> So, hi everyone. This story is largely brought to you by the enabling habits of all the lovely folks who follow me on tumblr, who, instead of telling me my four a.m. deaged Loki feels were ridiculous (spoiler: they're pretty goddamned ridiculous), instead told me to write about them.
> 
> The title of this is taken from Vienna Teng's song Antebellum, which is lovely and worth listening to.
> 
> Enjoy.

Loki at eleven is coltish, already tall for his age but without the gracefulness that usually balances out the height. Between that, and the fact that the only clothes Thor could scrounge up to fit him were Darcy's little brother's stuff—hilariously enough, Tony would like to note, including an Iron Man shirt that's a size too big on Loki, meaning Loki's nearly drowning in folds of fabric all decorated with Tony's face mask—Loki looks young and strangely human, and Tony's not entirely sure what to make of that.

How, exactly, did Tony come by this knowledge of what the god of mischief looked like at the Norse god equivalent of age eleven?

That's a great question. If anyone has the answer, Tony would love to hear it.

…

The thing is, Loki's second childhood starts in the middle of battle—at almost exactly the same moment that Loki suddenly turns into a kid again, Tony's a little busy on the other side of the battlefield, dealing with the monsters Loki summoned up from who knows where to help him out. And, really, if Tony's feeling honest, at that specific moment, _dealing with_ pretty much means _being thrown through a window by_.

Up until that moment, Tony was doing alright, in his opinion. He was a little disturbed to realize that Loki had upgraded from his usual shtick—namely illusions, which looked real as hell until you touched them and then disappeared like fog—to actual, corporeal beasts that he seemed to have called through some sort of portal. 

“Am I the only one having a not-so-nostalgic trip down memory lane here?” Tony asked, trying to cover over his genuine reaction at seeing Loki holding open a blue-black portal in the middle of a Manhattan street with glibness. It didn't particularly work; fortunately for Tony, though, his teammates were all a bit too distracted to call him on it. 

Steve, as usual, took charge of the situation. “Thor, Widow, I want you on Loki. We need to get that portal down, and taking him down is our best chance. Hawkeye, up on the roof there to give us cover. I'll stick around here, keep the monsters of everyone's backs. Iron Man, Hulk, you track down the ones that already escaped, and bring them down.”

“Yes, sir,” Tony said, with a half-sarcastic salute, and scooped up Clint to drop him off on the roof Steve had pointed out. A low roar below told Tony the Hulk had come out to play—Tony grinned, and flew a little faster. No matter how much Bruce still resented his powers, Tony liked fighting beside the ragemonster equally as much as he liked spending time with Bruce.

“I love the way you hold me,” Clint informed him as they flew, voice absolutely deadpan, comms carrying the sound where the helmet would have blocked it. Tony, behind the mask, grinned. It wasn't really a battle if Barton wasn't bitching about hitching a ride—and Tony always made sure to grab him in the least dignified positions possible, because over short distances proper weight distribution was much less important than pissing Clint off.

Tony dropped Clint unceremoniously on the rooftop and said, “Aw, honey, you care,” and then, ritual done, turned to join the fight. By that point, Natasha and Thor were already close on Loki, Natasha sneaking up behind him while Thor's completely unsubtle lightning acted as a distraction. Cap, below, was a red-white-and-blue spectacle of athleticism, as usual, his shield darting out to keep Loki's monsters boxed in and distracted. As for the Hulk, well, it wasn't exactly hard to follow his trail. “You're all making this look easy,” Tony said over the comms, as usual totally ignoring Cap's standards for proper comm protocol. “Save a little fight for me, hey? I get bored otherwise.”

Fast forward thirty minutes, and Tony's really not bored at all, given the whole being thrown through a window thing. He picks himself up from the shattered glass under his suit and mutters, “Son of a bitch.” Whatever Loki's monsters are, they're hard as hell to put down. They look like chimerae, fight like demons, and can take more ordinance than the average tank before they suffer any real harm. “Jarvis, tell me you've got something new for me. This is starting to look a little pathetic.”

Tony engages the repulsors, taking a second to make sure the chimera isn't waiting right outside the hole it'd thrown him through. When the coast looks clear, Tony exits the building the same way he'd come in. “No, sir,” Jarvis informs him, “though I would like to remind you that fifty-six percent power is not optimal, for either your heart or the suit's functions.”

“I can take a few more hits,” Tony says, idly, but mostly his brain's turning over the question of why he hasn't taken more hits already. The chimerae hadn't really been showing much inclination to give Tony a friendly breather before—their whole hunting strategy seemed to be based on running their prey into the ground in groups, which was, as plans went, both simplistic and ridiculously efficient given the strength of the things. Basically, Tony's put a bit on edge by the fact that nothing's started trying to maul him again yet. Are they learning new strategies as time passes or something?

Then he turns a street corner, and gets his answer in the form of the Hulk, sitting in a small crater on the pavement, surrounded by the still forms of the last three chimerae that Tony hadn't managed to finish off. Tony feels himself grinning widely behind his mask, and says, through the suit's external speakers, “There's a reason why you're my favorite. Seriously.” The deadly green giant, bless his little heart, looks up at Tony's suit and bares his teeth in what Tony is choosing to interpret as an affectionate smile rather than a threat to back off. 

Tony takes a look around, and says, realizing suddenly how quiet everything has gotten, “Wait, is that it? Loki's down?” He'd been expecting the fight to drag on for at least another hour—Loki is generally nearly impossible to actually incapacitate, and when his plans involve magic alongside the usual cunning, the added complication makes doing their jobs even more time consuming. It probably should be a good thing, the sudden silence in the streets—if Thor isn't shouting war cries any more, it means they've won, and victory's always the end goal—but instead Tony just feels on edge, weirdly certain that something has gone wrong. “Cap?” Tony says inquisitively, broadcasting over the comms. “Is everything alright on your end?”

“Um,” Cap says, and that alone is enough to make Tony nervous. Steve says 'um' sometimes, of course—Steve, for all the living legend stuff, is just as human as the rest of them, so of course he has moments where he isn't perfectly in control of the conversation—but Cap? Coming from Captain America, who puts so much effort into being totally in control of himself and the situation around him, that 'um' is definitely a sign of something not being right. “I think you'd better come see this for yourself.”

Tony's eyebrows shoot up at that, but no matter how surprised he is, Tony isn't about to say no. “Can do, Cap,” Tony says, and shuts the comms. He looks up at the Hulk and says, “Come on, big guy. Let's go check it out.”

When Tony sets back down in the area he left the others in, it only takes a few seconds for him to realize what happened. Cap, Natasha and Thor are all standing some distance from where Tony had last seen Loki, Cap looking strangely conflicted, Natasha wary, and Thor downright heartbroken.

And there, laying unconscious not five feet away from the half-circle of their bodies, is Loki: not Loki as Tony knows him, though, not the tall, lean, sharp-edged god that hides everything behind a biting smile and all that goddamned cleverness. No, the Loki Tony sees is nearly a foot shorter than the Loki Tony is accustomed to, and is practically drowning in the leather armor that usually clings to him like a second skin. Loki's eyes are shut, and the rhythm of his breathing makes it seem like he'd just fallen asleep in the middle of the street, instead of doing...whatever the hell it is that he's done.

Tony's first thought is that it's an illusion, but he dismisses that in a heartbeat—Cap wouldn't exactly have called Tony here to peacefully admire the latest of Loki's illusions, so chances are something happened to make his teammates pretty sure this is the genuine article.

Which means, of course, that Loki is really passed out on the street in front of them, suddenly no older than maybe twelve or thirteen.

“Well,” Tony says out loud, articulating what he's pretty sure every single one of his teammates is thinking right now. “Shit.”

**Author's Note:**

> If you got this far and enjoyed, please feel free to leave a comment either here or at my tumblr: http://skollwolf.tumblr.com/
> 
> I always love hearing from readers, and would be happy to talk over any questions, thoughts or concerns you guys have. :)
> 
> Also, I make no promises about the update schedule for this fic, because I'm currently writing two stories that update weekly and participating in the Frostiron big bang. I'll try to update as often as I can, between all those things.


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